I'm not afraid
of dying."

She would tell him no more; she defied him; and yet he did not kill
her. She lay weeping, moaning, at intervals, repeating that desolate
phrase, "What's the use? Oh, what's the use?"

Irremediable loss--it sounded in her voice, it crept coldly in his
burning veins, it came spreading, flooding, filling the whole earth in
the first faint glimmer of dawn. He sat on the edge of the bed, let
his hands fall heavy and inert between his knees, and for a long time
did not change his attitude.

Just now, looking down at her, he had felt a sickness of loathing. He
hated her for the musical note of her voice, the tragic eloquence of
her eyes, and above all he hated her for her nakedness. The almost
nude sprawling form seemed to symbolize the unspeakable shame of his
sex. This was the disgusting female, round and smooth, white and weak,
with tumbling hair and lying lips, the lewd parasite that can drag the
noble male down into hell-fire. Now he looked at her with comparative
indifference, and felt even pity for the broken and soiled thing that
he had believed to be clean and sound.

The fusion of his thoughts was over. One thought had split away from
all the rest, and every moment was becoming more definite, more
logical, more full of excruciating pain. He thought now only of his
enemy, of the human fiend who had destroyed Mavis and himself.

At least she had been innocent once. She was clean and good--really
and truly the candid child that she had never ceased to seem to
be--when that sliming, crawling reptile first got his coils about her.
As he thought of the maddening reality, his imagination made pictures
that printed themselves, deep and indelible, on the soft recording
surfaces of his brain. Henceforth, so long as blood pumped, nerves
worked, and cells and fibers held to their shape, he would see these
pictures--must see them each time that chance stirred his memory of
the facts for which they stood as emblems.

And with his rage against the man came more and more detestation of
the crime itself. At the very beginning it had no possible excuse in
honest love. There was nothing belonging to it of nature's grand
instinct. It had not the inexorable brutality of primitive passion.
Here was an old, or an elderly man, not driven by the force of normal,
full-blooded desire, but craftily plotting, treacherously abusing his
power, because he was rotten with impure whims--befouling youth and
innocenc